backyard crowing



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lemurs!

This morning I wrote a beautiful, touching, genuine journal entry, but I lost it all, grace a mon ordinateur who is refresh-happy. Don't you just hate it when that happens? It's not the first time, though.

Oh, well. I can get over this and move on with my life. And hey, I still remember a tad bit of this morning's genius. So here goes:

Today I took my first physical anthropology test, and it didn't go quite as bad as the others have been. Hopefully I made a B, or even a C would be nice.

Last night I was on the phone with mom and she asked me what my grades were. Conveniently at that moment my phone went dead--kaput, and it still doesn't work. I can't call long distance from my dorm phone, so until I figure out what has gone wrong, she won't know that I've been doing extremely poorly in school lately. Infact, she may even forget she asked in the first place, although somehow I think that's unlikely. I was saved by my dying phone. I suppose this is bad karma, what with Christa thinking my phone was screwed up. She kept trying to contact me, you know, to pressure me into going to church stuff with her, and she eventually looked at the thing I filled out when they had their recruiting table out. That piece of paper has (gasp!) my email address on it and so yesterday she sent me an email saying that she has been trying to contact me, but she thought maybe my phone was malfunctioning. Well, now it is. I don't really care though, cell phones are annoying as inferno. I'm better off without it, hopefully my dad won't try to get me to go find a cingular store--I don't have time for that, and I simply won't do it. Not for something so pointless as to rescue a phone that I don't want ringing in the first place. I mean sure, they're handy and all, but why not free myself of such burdens? I know it has been a good day when I have no new messages or missed calls on my phone. Seriously, I relish not having to call people back. I'm not even a technophobe, really, I do know how to operate the crazy things. I just don't see why I should let something like that bother me.
I'm a "granola girl", as my aunt says.

An aside: Why do I always use the word "I"? I know why. It's because "I" am the person who I know best. And besides, if I don't think about myself, who will? I don't think I'm too selfish, I'm like any other girl. I think about I quite a bit, and if that's amoral/self-involved/name your negative adjective here, well then eat me. I don't care.

I feel like going to Chipotle but I'm far too tired to wrench myself out of bed. I'm also stuffed and do NOT need any more stuffing, thank you very much. Chipotle is a place that closes at ten. Whole Foods also closes at ten, which brings me to a nightmare I had two nights ago:

I was walking home from Whole Foods and it had just closed. I didn't have any purchases with me, which is extremely odd considering I walk two miles to get there, so I would never go and not buy anything. It was of course dark out, and I stepped into a rectangular grassy area 3/4 of the way surrounded in thigh-high shrubs, trying to figure out if I wanted to take 6th street home and surveying all the nearby streetcorners. Within a few seconds a guy spotted me and ran quickly up to me, saying something; I can't remember quite what. He put his hand underneath my left armpit and tickled. I then immediately realized it: he would take advantage of me if I didn't do something absolutely drastic. I froze for a moment, just to make him think that I wouldn't react, and then made a few sudden movements, fighting him off with all of my fierceness (which is not much, since I'm the sweet silent type, but I'm strong when it comes to self-defense of this sort). He fought back as I did, the drunk bastard. Then I awoke, too scared to let it continue.

I don't feel like writing about heavy crap like that right now, though. I'd rather talk to you about blue-eyed black lemurs, my new favorite animal.

Today in anthropology lab we got to go see them! They are absolutely adorable, and I couldn't ask for a better lab instructor. We observed them in captivity, behind a glass window with a mirror on their side, so they could hear but not see us. And if we were quiet enough, we might not be perceived at all! The wonderful thing about observing these little buddies in captivity is that because of the special glass, we could look right at them. In nature we couldn't do this because when you look straight at a lemur (or most animals, for that matter), it feels threatened and scampers off. So when scientists go out to observe lemurs in their habitat, they must rely on their peripheral vision to view the animals. They can't wear sunglasses, either--the lemurs just think you've got a pair of gigantic eyes. Blue-eyed black lemurs can live to be up to 27 years old, and the ones we viewed were cathemeral, meaning they're active both in the day and at night. They'll sleep for four hours, run around for four hours, sleep for four hours, etc. etc. They're folivores, which means they eat mostly leaves, but they also supplement their diet with some fresh fruit. The students doing research on the lemurs and the Primate Behavior kids test them on whether they can tell vertical black and white stripes from horizontal ones. As a reward for answering correctly, the lemur receives a raisin. Here's how it works: the student or researcher puts the two painted boards in front of the lemur, and the lemur jumps toward the board with the vertical stripes. They're quite smart, apparently, and they get very frustrated if they don't get their raisin--and they know when they should get a raisin. There are three of them here at UT: Buddy, Junior, and Lamour. Buddy and Junior are both males, and Lamour is a female. Lemurs are truly beautiful creatures, I really enjoyed watching them. I could sit there for a few hours and just look at them. We observed how many times they fed/groomed/fought/displaced/etc. in one minute's time. (When I say "they", I mean we looked at one lemur at a time, that's called focal observation). Focal observation is an easy vocab word to remember, because if you're FOCusing on one point, it's your FOCAL point, the one and only thing you're observing. Anyways...sigh...I love my physical anthropology class. Sometimes it makes me blush though! The other day the prof was talking about "red sexual swellings", in females and sitting in the front row became not such a good idea anymore. I stared down at my laptop, wholeheartedly ignoring him and the embarassing overhead projection before me. Yeesh. That guy likes the phrase "red sexual swelling", he used it about five times in a minute and a half. Maybe he just wants to shock us. What a guy.

Cathemeral - active at night and in the day
Diurnal - active in the day
Nocturnal - active at night

10:05 p.m. - 2005-10-05
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